It goes: “I try to say goodbye and I choke/ I try to walk away and I stumble/ Though I try to hide it, it’s clear/ My world crumbles when you are not here.”)Not for the first time, it took enthusiasm in Britain about a new American artist to wake up audiences in America. In January, with the announcement of the Grammy nominations, Gray suddenly caught alight in her own land. Album sales in the US have surpassed 1.3 million and are climbing fast.Gray’s journey to the top has taken far longer than the past eight months, however The first surprise is her age – she turned 30 in September For a new music sensation she is antique. No teen-star with more belly button than brain, she – not that we want to make comparisons here with others in the charts.She is also a divorced mum of three – Mel, Happy and Annisah – aged from two to five She delivered two babies in the same year in 1995. This is someone who has faced obstacles more serious than radio stations that don’t love her.

It is those experiences, say her fans, that make her lyrics affecting.Born Natalie McIntyre in a blue-collar neighbourhood of Canton, Ohio to a steelworker and a schoolteacher, she appropriated her stage name from a male family friend. As a child, she showed almost no interest in music and reluctantly, at her mother’s urging, took classical piano lessons for seven years A shy child, she was especially disinclined to speak up. Her voice even then was squeaky and odd and it sapped her confidence. That it should one day become the voice of a great singer never occurred to her or anyone else.

“People would talk to her and she wouldn’t say very much,” her mother recently recalled. “In the background I would say ’speak up, speak up’, but it made no difference. She wouldn’t.”She did listen to music, though, both at home – where her father was into Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Al Green and Sly Stone – and at high school, where her greatest passion was reserved for Prince. A two-year sojourn at a mostly white private boarding school – on a scholarship – ended with her expulsion and running away.